thefederalist | Last weekend, NBC News reported
that the Justice Department’s probe into the origins of the Russia
collusion investigation is now focusing on the CIA and the intelligence
community. NBC News soft-peddled this significant development by giving
former CIA Director John Brennan a platform (a pen?) to call the probe “bizarre,” and question “the legal basis for” the investigation. Politico soon joined the spin effort, branding the investigation Attorney General William Barr assigned to Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham “Trump’s vengeance.”
However, if the media reports are true, and Barr and Durham have turned
their focus to Brennan and the intelligence community, it is not a
matter of vengeance; it is a matter of connecting the dots in
congressional testimony and reports, leaks, and media spin, and facts
exposed during the three years of panting about supposed Russia
collusion. And it all started with Brennan.
That’s not how the story went, of course. The company story ran
that the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane surveillance of the Trump
campaign on July 31, 2016, after learning that a young Trump advisor,
George Papadopoulos, had bragged to an Australian diplomat, Alexander
Downer, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. This tip from
Downer, when coupled with WikiLeaks’s release of the hacked Democratic
National Committee emails and evidence of Russian efforts to influence
the 2016 presidential election, supposedly triggered the FBI’s decision
to target the Trump campaign.
